At the Wicker Knight's feet Kverna faced the foe. "I do not hate you," she said to them. "You are as you are. Maybe Perfection has no choices. It is this thing behind me I hate. Leeching our hope, and returning nothing. At least without it we will meet our fates as human beings."

Chris Willrich is a former librarian who lives with his family in the otherworldly environs of Silicon Valley. He's best known for his stories about the poet Persimmon Gaunt and the thief Imago Bone, who have appeared in various places including the novelette “The Sword of Loving Kindness” in the very first issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies and the novel The Scroll of Years and its sequels from Pyr. (Two of his other BCS stories, "Shadowdrop” and “How the Wicker Knight Would Not Move,” are set in the same world.) His work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and elsewhere, most recently the Gaunt and Bone story “What Lies in Ice” in Tales From the Magician’s Skull.